The Collector Otto Bettman The Life, Times And Unlikely Success Of The German Refugee Who Hoarded Five Million Pictures.

April 21, 1985|By Scott Eyman, Staff Writer

From the balcony of his father`s house, Otto Bettman could see the St. Thomas Church where, 300 years before, Johann Sebastian Bach had been the music director, and where Bettman was now thrilled to be singing in the choir. He would stand there, looking out over Leipzig while his family was tuning up behind him. In the 1920s, the best times of the Weimar Republic, music was in the people`s spirit and, if you lived in Leipzig, the home of Bach, why then you loved him the way someone from Boston loved Thoreau. Finally, Otto would turn from the view of the city where he would spend the first 23 years of his life, and go inside. His father would play the cello and his brother the violin, while Otto played the piano. His father may have been a doctor, but art was the Bettman family`s ruling passion.

When he thinks about those days, 60 years and several universes ago, Otto Bettman does not grow sentimental, even when his listener does. His brisk, inquisitive mind does not have time for false nostalgia. As he puts it, ``That was a true paradise. But they forgot about the snake.``

Analytical, enthusiastic, Bettman brings the same pithy judiciousness to bear on whatever the topic of conversation happens to be. As befits his Old World upbringing, conversational topics can range from Cartier-Bresson to the movies (``The art of our time``) to the obscure early work of Eugene O`Neill, all buttressed by two constants: Bach and the Bettman Archive. With the first, he needs no prompting; with the second, he needs a great deal.

The one was a hobby that turned into a vocation, a very prosperous one at that; the other a traditional interest that has become something of an obsessional avocation since he retired four years ago from the Archive, the world-famous picture library that he started in Berlin in 1928, and moved to New York under considerable duress in 1935.

He is 82 now, overflowing with life and the work that still needs to be done. His office in Boca Raton is small, but laden with books and Bach memorabilia; the man in it is brisk, fond of ascots that complement his white beard, and never without the large briefcase that holds some of the manuscripts on the life of Bach that he has been working on for years.

``I always come back to the old geezer,`` he says, gazing affectionately at a picture of the composer. `` `Old geezer!` I should talk. Most people think I died at the time of the Peloponnesian Wars.``

For Bettman, Bach is a symbol, not merely of the life he left behind, but of a life beyond life, a melodious orderliness built on solid craft that, by dint of equal amounts of inspiration and hard work, raises itself to art. In short, a guide to a rational life.

That was what Otto Bettman was searching for in Berlin, where he went after he earned his doctorate in history from the University of Leipzig in 1927. It seemed glorious; he was the curator of rare books at the State Art Museum in a country that celebrated Goethe`s birthday like America celebrates Thanksgiving.

Shortly after his arrival, the museum began mounting an exhibit devoted to old prints, paintings and engravings involving reading in art. As he was organizing it, Bettman noted a growing interest within himself in the idea of old pictures, and began to make small investments in other people`s cast-off photos and prints.

In a modest sort of way, he began renting them out, more to share the accumulation of knowledge they represented than to make money. But around him, Germany began to change, as economic disaster stimulated the political unrest that led to the rise to power, of a man named Adolf Hitler.

IN 1933, BETTMAN was discharged from his job at the library because he was a Jew. He was also prohibited from working in his field, for Jews were not assigned the numbers that identified Aryans and enabled them to hold employment. For two years, he scuffled to make a living, enlisting an Aryan friend as a front for the nascent Bettman Archive, selling pictures to medical firms for flyers, eking out a living that got harder and harder to make. The dream of culture was slowly dying.

``The tragic mistake of the Jews in Germany,`` says Bettman, ``was their emancipation. They tried to become more German than the Germans. They were so drenched in the Old Germany that they weren`t paying sufficient attention to the Germany that was happening around them. They all thought it would blow over -- and I do not except myself.``

For two years, he vacillated, knowing that his home was no longer his home, but afraid to leave the comfort of the familiar. An uncle, Alfred Bettman, who had become a successful lawyer in Cincinnati, began a campaign to lure the German branch of the family to the United States. Twice, Bettman met his uncle in London, and the second time he was convinced that simple survival dictated a move to America.